About

Welcome to The Green Examining Room, a project at the crossroads of health and environment.

Authored by Dr. Charles, the pen name of a practicing family physician, this site aims to be a useful collection of articles, ideas, and links that may help reinforce green approaches to our health and lifestyle.

The guiding principles and objectives of The Green Examining Room should be:

1) To preserve a skepticism about products that claim to be green, natural, or organic, but nonetheless to review and highlight products and medicines that seem to pass scientific and intuitive muster.

2) To emphasize and encourage lifestyle changes as they relate to prevention, wellness, and disease treatment. To consider behavioral changes and lifestyle choices the prime remedies for many health problems, but to reject an absolutism which might suggest conventional medicine is evil.

3) To consider food and cuisine one of life’s great joys, and to expound upon a Franco-MichaelPollan-esque food philosophy.

4) To investigate and learn more about the negative impacts on the environment by our health system, which, at almost 20% of US GDP, is most likely incredibly depressing.

5) To investigate and learn more about the negative impacts on our health system by the industries, chemicals, and processes that are affecting our environment. From emission scrubbing to fracking to suburban sprawl to exfoliative soaps, we are what we create and destroy.

6) We should strive to live a selectively Amish life.
What I mean by this is that in a world of transformative technologies, communication, agriculture, and medicine, we need to decide for ourselves what walls we should fortify around our humanism, privacy, bodies and culture. I feel it is healthier to turn off a cell phone at night for many reasons, and I think that the majority of television programming contaminates the mind. I realize these thoughts are perhaps based more upon a belief system than empiric truth. Perhaps selectively Luddite is a less romanticized notion, but I love the Amish, so forgive me for my naive presumptions.

7) To err on the side of caution with warnings, but to resist paranoia and the manipulative tendencies of fear.

i’m a med student and interested in reading your site. i’m interested in using my life to help preserve the environment, in what ways i can, and am looking forward to reading your thoughts on the subject